Pimplomat

Every year I post my annual list of which books I read, a list that helps me remember past events and feelings that I may have forgotten, like resting in my hammock on a nice summer day reading The Truth About Celia or the eagerness I felt flying to Italy while reading Poets in a Landscape. You could say that I remember things through the books I’ve read. I don’t think that’s such a bad way to live.  Happy reading in 2012, everyone!

Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Me, Myself & I by Edward Albee
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Diviners by Jim Leonard Jr.
The Second Child by Deborah Garrison
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton
Burn This by Lanford Wilson
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute
Augustus by John Williams
Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet
Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier
A Happy Death by Albert Camus
The Commedia dell’Arte by Giacomo Oreglia
The Architect of Flowers by William Lychack
The Actor’s Art and Craft by William Esper and Damon DiMarco
Dying City by Christopher Shinn
Slowness by Milan Kundera
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Improvise: Scene From the Inside Out by Mick Napier
Book of My Nights by Li-Young Lee
The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee (editors)
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Jitney by August Wilson
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honday Dynasty by Tony Hoagland
Travesties by Tom Stoppard
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin
The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson
The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti
In a Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil LaBute
Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
The Night Season by Rebecca Lenkiewicz
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Seven Guitars by August Wilson
The Curfew by Jesse Ball
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh
The Jokers by Albert Cossery
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis

Imagine walking through a door and forgetting everything. It’s possible, and a new study in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology explains how. Abstract, you have the floor.

Previous research using virtual environments has revealed a location-updating effect in which there is a decline in memory when people move from one location to another. Here we assess whether this effect reflects the influence of the experienced context, in terms of the degree of immersion of a person in an environment, as suggested by some work in spatial cognition, or by a shift in context. In Experiment 1, the degree of immersion was reduced by using smaller displays. In comparison, in Experiment 2 an actual, rather than a virtual, environment was used, to maximize immersion. Location-updating effects were observed under both of these conditions. In Experiment 3, the original encoding context was reinstated by having a person return to the original room in which objects were first encoded. However, inconsistent with an encoding specificity account, memory did not improve by reinstating this context. Finally, we did a further analysis of the results of this and previous experiments to assess the differential influence of foregrounding and retrieval interference. Overall, these data are interpreted in terms of the event horizon model of event cognition and memory.

Still with me? Basically, what the researchers found is that new memory episodes (event models) form in our brains whenever we enter a new environment. As you move from place to place, you’re stacking memories on top of memories, making them harder to retrieve.

I imagine this knowledge could affect how educators, event planners, or anyone involved in learning and group collaboration structure their operations. If you know that moving people from room to room causes them to forget, wouldn’t it be better to keep everyone in one room all day? If that’s not technically feasible, then what can you do design-wise to mitigate the forgetting?

(Photo via Flickr: Istvan / Creative Commons)